tennis hall altheagibson york

1927-

American tennis player

Althea Gibson once characterized herself as a "Harlem street rebel," referring to her adolescence in New York City, when she was often without direction and—more often—in various trouble. Yet the world's first African-American tennis champion remained a gadfly all her life. In the late 1950s her scrappiness and athleticism enabled her to not only shatter the segregated, insular world of tennis but also to become the sport's dominant female player. Black tennis players such as Arthur Ashe, Zina Garrison and sisters Venus Williams and Serena Williams have frequently acknowledged their debt to Gibson. (Garrison in 1990 became the first black woman since Gibson to reach the final of a Grand Slam event.) After leaving the amateur tennis circuit in 1958, Gibson met the challenge of integrating women's professional golf. She has since retired from sports, having suffered a number of strokes and additional health problems, yet athletes and activists alike continue to honor Gibson's legacy. In 1971, Gibson was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, and in 2002 was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

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Gibson's parents, Daniel and Anna Washington Gibson, worked as sharecroppers on a cotton farm in South Carolina. Sharecropping, in which farmers work someone else's land and receive a small part of their crop as pay, dates from the Civil War. Even in the best of circumstances, sharecropping rarely offered a decent living.
Althea Gibson
When the cotton crop failed three years i…

Tennis had changed Gibson, giving her an outlet for her energy. When she was just starting out, Gibson didn't know how to channel her feistiness. Nana Davis, who beat Gibson in the all-black American Tennis Association (ATA) national girls final, recalled in an interview with Time magazine that Gibson was "a very crude creature," seemingly more interested in a fight than a win…

That August, the USLTA accepted Gibson's application. She entered court 14 at Forest Hills and defeated Barbara Knapp in straight sets, 6-2, 6-2. Gibson led Denise Brough 7-6 in a tiebreaker in the next round, but a thunderstorm interceded. She dropped the tiebreaker 9-7, but made history as the first black to play at the U.S. Open. Gibson was ranked seventh in 1952, but fell to 70th the fo…

In 1958, Gibson published her autobiography I Always Wanted to Be Somebody. She began a career in music and theater. Sugar Ray Robinson had bought her a saxophone when she was a youngster, and she had a sultry singing voice, with which she enchanted the crowd at the 1957 Wimbledon ball. (She sang the romantic "I Can't Give You Anything but Love.") In 1959 she cut an album, Alt…

I Always Wanted to Be Somebody, New York: Harper, 1958. California-born Alice Marble (1913-1990) was the first woman to capture both Wimbledon and U.S. Open singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles in the same year. She learned her sport on the public courts of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Unable to afford a tennis racquet, she played with borrowed equipment until coach Eleanor Tennant dis…

California-born Alice Marble (1913-1990) was the first woman to capture both Wimbledon and U.S. Open singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles in the same year. She learned her sport on the public courts of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Unable to afford a tennis racquet, she played with borrowed equipment until coach Eleanor Tennant discovered her. In exchange for lessons, Marble performed s…

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